How often as a tester do you think that you spend a big chunk of your testing time in reporting the defects rather than testing actually? There could be multiple reasons of this:
- The defect template could be complex
- You might be slow in typing
- You might not be so good in vocabulary
How many times did it happen that you logged a defect and developer rejected because the steps were not detailed enough to replicate the issue.
A good bug report is responsibility of the tester and each stakeholders expect the same. I noticed the same issue within my project; Team spend too much time on writing effective bug reports. On average it takes 30 minutes to log a defect. That is a big time. If one found 6 defects that means the person had spent around 3 hours to report those defect. That was something pinning me for last few months and I was eagerly looking for a solution to get over this problem.
Recently, I came to know about “Problem Steps Recorder” which caught my attention. Microsoft has provided this utility in Windows 7 to record the problem steps in Microsoft Window. PSR captures the events happening on the screen and create a low size zip file with all steps and screenshots happening at the desktop.
PSR also provides the facility to annotate the screenshot during the runtime. Just select the screen area and enter your comment. The same will be added in the Report. Isn’t it awesome?
You can even disable the screen capture as per your need.
This is kind of what I was exactly looking for. The next step was to know how team feels about it.
On a good day, I called my team for training and demonstrated this tool. They all were quite excited and wanted to use it immediately and there was no reason to stop them. So, I asked them to use the tool and let me know their opinion. Till now, I got very positive feedback about the tool so I am thinking to take it to next level; to get it approved from important stakeholders, mainly Project Manager and Customer. No matter how others’ take this, it has already become a mandatory part of my Test Armory.
If you practice testing, How about using it in your practice sessions? Please share your opinion in this thread.
